This 52-page article appears in the latest volume of the Catholic University Law School’s CommLaw Conspectus. The article can be found online here.
In this essay, I make the case that the radically unfair system of modern broadcast industry regulation must be completely abolished. “If America is to have a consistent First Amendment in the Information Age,” I argue, “efforts to extend the broadcast regulatory regime must be halted and that regime must be relegated to the ash heap of history.” I go on to make the case against all the traditional broadcast industry regulatory rationales and conclude that: “the traditional rationales for asymmetrical regulation of broadcasting — scarcity, pervasiveness, and the public interest — either no longer make sense or are increasingly impractical to enforce in an age of technological convergence and media abundance. Instead of resisting the inexorable movement toward media parity and a consistent First Amendment standard for the Information Age, policymakers should embrace these changes and focus on responding to the problem of objectionable content through education and empowerment-based strategies that enable families to craft their own household media standards.”
The podcast of my keynote speech at EDUCAUSE, “Mapping the Fault Lines in Telecom, Media and Tech Lobbying,” is now available an online podcast.
Here’s the blurb from the event:
The digital convergence of telecommunications, media, and technology is changing the landscape for policy makers and the industries that lobby them, as well as the users of computers, telephones, entertainment and knowledge. The Center for Public Integrity’s Well Connected project tracks each of the major telecom, broadcast, cable, news, entertainment, wireless, and computer companies. Americans can access this free database to see who owns the media and communications networks in their city by typing in their ZIP code. The project is also responsible for a freedom of information lawsuit to obtain data about local broadband deployment from the FCC. This session will address the need for the educational users of computing and communication to be attuned to the lobbying fault lines that affect all of these sectors, with a particular focus on recent developments in telecommunications and intellectual property.
TLFers may be interested to note that Jim Harper’s keynote podcast is also available.
Now that I have completed my 10-part series of essays to coincide with “National Internet Safety Month,” I thought I’d list them all in one place. All the information in this series of essays was condensed from my new Progress & Freedom Foundation special report, “Parental Controls and Online Child Protection: A Survey of Tools and Methods.” I will be making constant updates to that report online, so if you have suggestions please let me know.
The links for the 10 installments in the series are listed below:
One of the themes I’ve been hitting a lot recently in talks on the subject is how going digital with identification is changing the meaning of being identified. IDing someone used to be a one-time interaction. It is becoming a record-keeping event.
There are plenty of absurdities. One is that really old people, who are obviously of-age, are having to show ID. The other – more subtle, but more important – is that people are showing ID to prove age. This violates the privacy protecting practice of “data minimization” – collecting only the information you need to serve your purpose. Tennessee law requires people to share identity information as well as age, violating the principle of data minimization daily, every time someone buys beer.
This is the final installment of my 10-part series of essays that have coincided with “Internet Safety Month.” Many of these essays have focused on the variety of parental controls tools on the market that can help parents better control, or at least monitor, their children’s Internet usage or online communications. (See parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6.) Other essays focused on the importance of education, building public awareness, and the need for stepped-up law enforcement efforts aimed at prosecuting online predators. (See parts 7, 8, and 9).
In this final installment, I want to focus on what I believe is the most important—and most frequently overlooked—part of the parental controls and online safety discussion: Good parenting!
Specifically, it is important to realize that many household-level rules and informal parental control methods exist that represent the most important steps that most parents can take in dealing with potentially objectionable content or teaching their children how to be sensible, savvy media users. Indeed, to the extent that many households never take advantage of the many technical tools I outlined in earlier essays, it is likely because they rely instead on the informal household media rules and strategies discussed below.
Ed Felten and Tim Wu both have interesting posts on the release of the iPhone. In a sense, they make precisely the same technical observation—that more open wireless networks would be good for innovation—but Felten is an optimist about it, while Wu is a pessimist. First, here’s Wu:
the iPhone is locked, as is de rigueur in the wireless world. It will work only with one carrier, AT&T. Judged by the standards of a personal computer or electronics, that’s odd: Imagine buying a Dell that worked only with Comcast Internet access or a VCR that worked only with NBC. Despite the fact that the iPhone costs $500 or so, it cannot yet be brought over to T-Mobile or Verizon or Sprint. AT&T sees this as a feature, not a bug, as every new iPhone customer must commit to a two-year, $1,400 to $2,400 contract.
If Apple wanted to be “revolutionary,” it would sell an unlocked version of the iPhone that, like a computer, you could bring to the carrier of your choice. An even more radical device would be the “X Phone”—a phone on permanent roam that chose whatever network was providing the best service. Imagine, for example, using your iPhone to talk on Sprint because it had the best voice coverage in Alaska, while at the same time using Verizon’s 3G network for Internet access. Of course, getting that phone to market would be difficult, and Apple hasn’t tried.
Via Luis, I don’t know if there’s a specific policy angle, but this talk by Eben Moglen at Google is interesting:
The really interesting thing about this talk, from my perspective, is that it illustrates the extent to which the free software community is driven by informal norms and the power of reputation. Moglen’s basic argument is that Google’s image in the free software community is important to its long-term success as a company, and that it is therefore in Google’s self-interest to voluntarily give back code over and above what the GPL requires as a way to build social capital.
I’m not sure if this argument is right, but if it is, I think it suggests why the hand-wringing over the specific terms of GPL v3 are probably overblown. The GPL is as much a social contract as a legal document. Going to court is an important backstop for its terms, but the primary enforcement mechanism are pressures from the hacker community. This is why hackers cared so much about making an example of Novell when it signed the patent agreement with Microsoft: they want to make sure that companies that violate the spirit of the GPL pay a high price. When the primary enforcement mechanisms are social rather than legal, the exact legal terms aren’t that important: if you behave in a way that’s contrary to the spirit of the GPL, you’ll have the same problems Novell did, regardless of what the letter of the license says.
By the same token, it is likely to be in Google’s interest to give non-essential code back to the free software community even though the GPL doesn’t specifically require them to as a way of building the social capital within the free software community. As the free software community grows, the exact terms of free software licenses may become less and less important as a robust set of social norms emerge that pressure companies far more effectively than a legal document possibly could.
The Federal Trade Commission is “unaware of any significant market failure or demonstrated consumer harm from conduct by broadband providers,” according to a Staff Report on Broadband Connectivity Competition Policy, which advises:
Policy makers should be wary of enacting regulation solely to prevent prospective harm to consumer welfare, particularly given the indeterminate effects on such welfare of potential conduct by broadband providers and the law enforcement structures that already exist.
The report indicates FTC staff believes it is “impossible to determine in the abstract” whether allowing content and applications providers (or even end users) to pay broadband providers for prioritized data transmission will be beneficial or harmful to consumer welfare. Similarly, staff feels broadband providers have “conflicting incentives” relating to blockage and discrimination against data from non-affiliated providers and that, in the abstract, “it is impossible to know which of these incentives would prove stronger for each broadband provider.”
It’s no secret that the Fairness Doctrine isn’t popular in the talk radio world. The effort to revive the rule is largely aimed at curbing that media, and most major talk shows hosts have (rightfully) turned the idea into a policy pinata. Less well known, however, is the fact that the Fairness Doctrine is also taking a major caning online. Usually, the blogoshere is friendly territory for the left. But when it comes to the Fairness Doctrine, its been anything but.
A quick google blog search earlier today on the term “fairness doctrine” shows the extent of the problem for supporters: of the top ten posts on the subject which take a position, nine were against reimposing the Doctrine. And it doesn’t seem to get much better in the next 10, or the 10 after that. Sure, there’s been some spirited defenses of regulation coming from the Huffington Post and elsewhere, but they’ve been vasted outnumbered by critics.
And it’s mostly not from professional policy wonks, judging by the names of the blogs, which often are as colorful as their arguments. Here’s a sampling:
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology. Learn more about TLF →
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.